A Call for the World’s First Rewilding Nation
Excerpt from this story from Earth Island Journal:
Long ago, the European brown bear roamed Scotland. So did herds of elk. Wolves traversed the islands, walruses populated the rugged coasts, and sea eagles soared over the moorlands. Birch, hazel, pine, and oak trees regally crowned throughout Scotland’s landscape. Woodlands, in fact, covered much of the country.
Scotland lost its bears to hunters and habitat loss by the tenth century. It lost its elk a few centuries later. The country’s last known wolf was shot and killed in 1743. The last sea eagle eggs were taken by an English vicar in 1916 and the last adult sea eagle was shot and killed in 1918. Walruses rarely make appearances along the coast. By 1900, woodland covered only about 5 percent of Scotland’s land area. Scotland today is nothing like Scotland was several centuries ago.
Activists, though, have planted seeds — literally and figuratively — to change that. To return the country, as much as it can be, to the vibrant natural home that it once was: one full of foxes and fescues; beaver and bees; capercaillies and cloudberries. To return it to a place that supports the species still present in the landscape, and then slowly reintroduce lost species over time.
Enter the Scotland Rewilding Alliance (SRA). The SRA, formed in 2019, is a collaboration of over 20 like-minded organizations that share a mission to enable rewilding at a scale new to Scotland. To not only conserve what little natural habitat remains in Scotland, but to expand it. Member organizations, such as Trees for Life, Woodland Trust Scotland, Rewilding Britain, Cairngorms Connect, South Uplands Partnership, Open Seas, and others, are asking the government to make Scotland the world’s first “rewilding nation” before Scotland hosts the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November by committing to a nationwide rewilding effort.